Even as the ball left his racket, David Nalbandian knew it was going out. He
had just played a running forehand at break point down and was evidently
going to surrender the game.

Marin Cilic’s skilful service return had pinned him into the corner, and the Croatian was about to seize a crucial break in the second set. Everybody could see that. But what nobody could have foreseen was what happened next.

It was the moment the genteel pursuit of lawn tennis morphed suddenly and violently into a contact sport. Nalbandian’s momentum had taken him to the very edge of the court.

Out of the corner of his eye he would have spied a plywood advertising hoarding maybe four feet across — blue, emblazoned with the Nike tick. What he failed to spot was the modest figure of line judge Andrew McDougall, sitting in a small chair behind it.

In an instant, the frustration and rage inside Nalbandian at losing such a crucial game — and who knows what else? — exploded from him.

He aimed a huge kick at the hoarding. This was no petulant flick of the ankle. The speed at which Nalbandian was travelling — close to full pelt — would have turned his tennis shoe into a blunt and brutal weapon. It was a shot Carlos Tévez would have been proud of.

“Sometimes you get angry,” he said later. “Sometimes you cannot control those moments. Maybe you throw a racket or maybe you scream or maybe you do something like that. So many things happen.”

This is what happened: the hoarding smashed into pieces, clattering into the left shin of McDougall, a balding 54-year-old gentleman in sunglasses, who recoiled instantly in pain. As the crowd gasped, Nalbandian appeared slowly to grasp the gravity of what he had just done.

Cilic was awarded the title by default. The Croatian was, unsurprisingly, dissatisfied.

“To end the week like this feels a bit bitter,” he said. “I don’t think it’s going to happen in the next hundred years, for sure.”

So, why? Why would a player of such natural talent, a Wimbledon finalist in 2002, throw a possible championship away as unthinkingly as if it were a sweet wrapper?

He was remorseful for the injury he had inflicted: “I do a mistake and I apologise, and I feel very sorry for the guy,” he said. “I didn’t want to do that.”

At the same time, though, he bizarrely attempted to deflect blame on to the game’s governing body.

“At the beginning of the year, you have to sign that you agree with everything that the ATP says, right?” he said.

“And sometimes you don’t. You don’t have the chance to ask, to tell, to change something.

"Sometimes the ATP put a lot of pressure on the players, and sometimes you get injured because you play on a dangerous surface and nothing happens.”

He was referring to points during the previous week when he had been made to play in damp conditions. Whether Nalbandian’s concerns were legitimate or not, this was no time to air them. It was a smokescreen, erected to disguise his serious anger problem.

This was not his first offence, having been fined £5,400 in January for throwing water at an official during the Australian Open.

The Argentine was automatically stripped of his prize money of £36,000, with the ATP able to levy a further £6,400 fine at its discretion.

That will be painful enough, but the 250 ranking points he would have received for winning the tournament could have elevated him into the world’s top 32 and earned him a seeding at Wimbledon.

Instead, this incident imprints a dirty and indelible stain on his career. The spectators at Queen’s, some of whom had paid over £100 for their Sunday ticket, will certainly not forgive him.

Many of them had missed Nalbandian’s fleeting moment of madness, and as the match was terminated, boos rang out from all four sides of the court.

They had witnessed half a classic final. Cilic was in the ascendancy, and had just gone 4-3 up, a break ahead in the second set after losing a tie-break in the first.

Yes, that’s right: at the time of Nalbandian’s outburst, he was actually still winning. On a day of bizarre occurrences, that fact was probably the most ridiculous of the lot.

Meanwhile, Tommy Haas showed he is still capable of springing a surprise at the age of 34 with a 7-6, 6-4 win over Roger Federer in the Halle Open final in Germany.